La Défense under siege

Members of France’s Republican Guard march during the Bastille Day parade in Paris.
Photo Reuters

The annual Bastille Day parade down the Champs-Elysées is a ritual moment, when France puts on its finery and shows off its might. This year the pageant coincides with a crunch time for the country’s military interventions abroad.

France has been stretched by three simultaneous armed conflicts this year – in Afghanistan, Côte d’Ivoire and Libya. This week it announced it was withdrawing from the first and extending the last. But public support for the Libyan mission is ebbing, and President
Nicolas Sarkozy
is under pressure to show that the end is in sight.

On a surprise visit to Afghanistan this week, Sarkozy confirmed that, in line with the United States’ retreat, France plans to withdraw its 4000 troops by 2014. A quarter will leave by the end of next year. A day after the announcement, five French soldiers were killed in a suicide bomb attack in the north-east of Afghanistan. Yet even as the withdrawal is due to begin, Parliament has voted to extend French participation in Libya.

Parliamentary approval for continuing to strike Colonel
Muammar Gaddafi
’s regime was a foregone conclusion, thanks to broad cross-party support, but public opinion is less sure. When Sarkozy first sent his fighter aircraft across the Mediterranean in March, amid stirrings of renewed national pride, 66 per cent of the French approved. Yet as the war has dragged on, support for an operation costing $US1.4 million ($1.3 million) a day has dropped. Last month, support dipped below 50 per cent.

French fighters have carried out about a third of all NATO air strikes. In the first week of July, they flew 249 sorties, hitting tanks, armoured vehicles, artillery, command posts and communications systems. These missions are taking their toll.

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The navy recently scolded some on board the aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle, which is on duty off Libya, for posting comments on the carrier’s blog that were sapping morale. Yet even Admiral Pierre-François Forissier, head of the French Navy, talked last month about broader operational strain.

If the Charles de Gaulle, his only aircraft carrier, stayed off Libya for the rest of the year, he said, the maintenance backlog would make it “totally non-operational" in 2012. “France no longer has the military means to match its political ambitions," ran a front-page headline in Le Monde.

Alain Juppé, the level-headed Foreign Minister (and Jacques Chirac’s prime minister in the mid-1990s), who took over earlier this year amid criticism of France’s ties to discredited north African regimes, dismisses such grumbling.

He denies French forces are overstretched and insists there is real progress in Libya. “Maybe I underestimated the resistance of Gaddafi and overestimated the capacity of the [rebel] national transitional council," he concedes. “But it’s now a question of weeks or months, not years."

The French have been dropping weapons into rebel-held territory, a decision they say does not breach the United Nations Security Council’s resolution authorising force, on the grounds that such weapons are necessary for the rebels’ “self-defence".

Juppé has confirmed there is contact with envoys from Gaddafi’s regime over a possible negotiated departure. Defence Minister Gérard Longuet has even hinted that Gaddafi might be allowed to stay in the country under a political settlement.

If Gaddafi fell, French public opinion would no doubt swiftly swing back behind the operation. Sarkozy, who is said to be contemplating a surprise visit to Benghazi, might even secure a boost in his languishing poll numbers. Juppé, who acts as a calm authority figure next to the more impulsive President, has already seen his standing rise.

The French, keen to put behind them charges of complicity with unsavoury Arab regimes, took a gamble with Libya, recognising the rebels early, demanding Gaddafi’s departure and pushing for air strikes. If things work out, it could still pay off.

Yet even Gaddafi’s departure would leave awkward questions for France. As it is, the country has found itself strained by fighting three wars at a time of tight defence budgets, as well as by the rationalisation of regiments and defence bases at home. “The armed forces today are fragile and weakened," said Admiral Edouard Guillaud, Chief of Defence Staff, in May. “One should not deny it or disguise it – we are in a difficult situation."

France’s operation in Côte d’Ivoire, which was instrumental in ousting a recalcitrant Laurent Gbagbo, the electorally defeated president, demonstrated its ability to put force behind fine words in well-defined military action.

But Libya has exposed some troubling conclusions about more ambitious adventures.

One is a consequence of Europe’s internal divisions. The French are still reeling from Germany’s decision to abstain, with Russia and China, from the UN Security Council vote on Libya. Germany’s pacifist reflex has not only complicated NATO’s operational planning for Libya, it also further undermines a pet French project for common European defence.

The French always argued that their full reintegration into NATO, engineered by Sarkozy in 2009 in a stunning break with Gaullist posturing, should be conditional on progress in European defence. Yet this now seems less likely than ever, despite a new Franco-British defence treaty.

As Juppé puts it: “For us, this is a brick in a bigger building; for the UK, it’s just a bilateral deal."

As for France’s trans-Atlantic ties, Libya has been a bruising experience too. After the fallout over the 2003 war in Iraq, Sarkozy carefully mended relations, taking a risk by confronting deep-seated French anti-Americanism.

But the Libyan mission has been something of a wake-up call. Juppé describes as “rather astonishing" last month’s comments by
Robert Gates
, former US defence secretary, criticising Europe’s paltry defence efforts. The reality, Juppé retorts, is that “we think the Americans aren’t doing enough".

Gates is surely right that the Europeans have become over-reliant on US military capacity, in Libya and elsewhere. Yet the latest blow for the French has been that the Americans seem so reluctant to use their own firepower. “The sobering lesson from Libya is that you can’t take the Atlantic alliance for granted," says François Heisbourg, at the Foundation for Strategic Research. “For a country that has only just reintegrated fully into NATO, that is a real shock."